The closer you get to your retirement, the fewer risks you should be taking with your money and investments. That’s just good common sense, because you can’t find yourself after you stop working “losing” value in your nest egg or you will be in for real trouble. But it isn’t as easy as it sounds, because while you are looking for something that’s really “safe” and carry at most minimal risk, you are also looking for something with some kind of growth so you can keep ahead of inflation at the very least. So how do you find safe investments when you are in the retirement mindset?

Diversify Your Investments

The best investment advice for anyone, retiree or not quite there yet, is to diversify. That’s because it is a way to avoid putting all of your eggs into just one basket and gives you a hedge or safety net on exactly what happens in a typical market cycle.

Once upon a time, getting a home loan was as simple as walking down to the local bank, sitting down with the manager, shaking hands, and presto! You’ve got a home loan and your local bank was your home lender. That’s pretty much the way it used to be.

Today, with the advent and popularity of online lending, times have really changed. Borrowers are now spoiled with so much info and so many choices! Right now (and how many times have you heard it over and over again in recent years) mortgage and refinancing rates are at really low numbers. With so many different lenders beating a path to your door and giving customers so much different information, how do you know when you’ve chosen a great deal from a great home lender? Well, wonder no more!

If you are reading this post, chances are that you already understand what debt is and even may be neck deep in debt right now. That might even be true for you if just a few months ago you were actually making a pretty healthy salary.

There are some good reasons you could have for being in that condition. The first one being that you may have recently lost your job because of the pandemic and that has cut off your main source of income. That just about always spells economic disaster. If you were never really any good at saving money, certainly losing your job will make your financial situation a lot worse.

It may be a little early to think about the potential Social Security COLA (cost of living adjustment) changes for 2021, but the writing might just already be on the wall. The pandemic, which is wreaking havoc with every facet of our lives right now, is also now targeting next year’s potential adjustments in the COLA and Social Security payments. Not very good news, is it?

With inflation likely to barely register this year, forecasters say that there will simply be no Social Security COLA for 2021. The COLA, which will be officially set in October 2020, would be zero, zilch, nada, nil. And that means no change in benefits next year for millions of Social Security beneficiaries. That is a blow that many just can’t take.

Most everyone thinks and worries about money whenever the subject of retirement is discussed. That totally makes sense because having enough money is such an important part of your retirement. With it, you can take care of yourself and enjoy life to the fullest, and when you don’t have enough of it, you are in some danger and high risk. I can write volumes about money and the ways to approach it when it comes to retirement and you will agree or disagree, but right now you may be dealing with another huge piece of the retirement planning puzzle.

That piece is a real life experience that over 30 million of us are now getting because of the COVID-19 pandemic and that is this: “How are you spending your time when you do not have to get up and go to work every day?” Is this like a dress rehearsal for your retirement?

As a former boss of mine once said to me (and I have regretfully repeated over the years), “Father’s Day is the most important day of the year”…not! Let’s get real here, your mom was, has been, and still is the very most important person ever. I’m not here to list all the reasons why and that is because you already know that without her, you just wouldn’t exist, so case closed. If you are fortunate enough to have your mom still around, it’s really important to recognize her. But how will you celebrate Mother’s Day in a COVID-19 world?

Family Together in Bedroom

Some Things Still Haven’t Changed – Yet

Whether you’re staying at home or not (and you must social distance in order to protect yourself and everyone around you), you can still send your mom a heartfelt or funny greeting card and you can do it without ever leaving your house.

The total number of coronavirus cases in the United States has now exceeded well over one million. The American death toll, over 60,000 now (that we know of), has surpassed that of the Vietnam War…in just 2 months. But today’s post is not about the horrendous health impacts of the virus so far, but the economic impacts yet to come.

The bad news is that our economy was reported this week to have shrunk by nearly 5% in the first quarter, the worst performance since the recession of a decade ago and probably the forerunner of a much steeper collapse in the second quarter that could be the worst one since the Great Depression, 90 years ago!

But in spite of these things, the White House on Wednesday declared its response to the crisis “a great success story”.

With all my free time these past few weeks, I have been mostly sitting around here thinking about the hundreds of thousands of victims around the world contracting the coronavirus. Watching the news each day is very depressing and frightening. Is there anything more we can do and are we on the way to stopping it? The questions I have and all of us have seem to be open and unresolved.

Second only to the life and death issues we face are the financial questions. Millions are now unemployed and the financial markets are crumbling around the world. So how is it possible that the U.S. government is handing out trillions of dollars to businesses and citizens? Where is all this money coming from? And even bigger of a question, how will the new national deficit ever get paid back?

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